The Fall of Adam
“Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.”
William Janeway was valedictorian at both The Dwight School in New York and then at Princeton before receiving his Ph.D. at Cambridge on a Marshall Scholarship.
I didn’t know his name before listening to his interview on the Masters in Business podcast:
Frankly, I didn’t even know his father’s name, Eliot Janeway, who worked in both the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations of the United States White House.
Economics, apparently, runs in the family.
Janeway’s advice, after decades in venture capital, is to study financial history even if someone is a student at Stanford or MIT today already studying computer science and/or electrical engineering.
Anyone thinking about his or her first or second job or someone older hoping to compound wealth can be easily derailed from financial independence if warning signs are avoided.
For example, Janeway points out that if the Baby Boomer generation had read The Way We Live Now (1875) growing up, maybe Bernie Madoff doesn’t manipulate the masses for so long:
“If you pardon all the evil done to you, you encourage others to do you evil!”
“Of course he had committed forgery; — of course he had committed robbery. That, indeed, was nothing, for he had been cheating and forging and stealing all his life.”
“If one wants to keep one’s self straight, one has to work hard at it, one way or the other. I suppose it all comes from the fall of Adam.”
“One seems inclined to think sometimes that any fool might do an honest business. But fraud requires a man to be alive and wide awake at every turn!”
If studying financial history is seen as a chore, then people will continue to fall prey to “pump and dump” schemes or something worse…
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